resources for grad students

An IDP is a helpful way to visualize your goals and keep track of your own progress, both personally and professionally. Science Careers runs a really nice website you can use to manage yours, though there are numerous templates available online.

This has many different names, but the idea remains the same. Creating a document with your mentor early on in your relationship provides you something to re-visit together when you meet to discuss updates and progress. There are many flavors of this available, but I’ve linked to a few good templates below. 

• Template 1 (brief)

• Template 2 (brief)

• Template 3

Diversifying (and mapping!) one's mentorship/adviser network can be a helpful exercise, so you have people to turn to outside of your PI and dissertation committee. Re-visiting this every 6 months (especially during grad school) was, for me, a nice way to evaluate in which areas/skillsets I wanted to prioritizing focusing on. Here is an example of one template mentorship network (note: I did not make this).